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Press Mentions

Ad Age: Why So Many Media Companies Stumble GloballyThe few news brands that have succeeded, to greater or lesser degrees, arguably include CNN, Bloomberg, People, Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Economist. Other contenders are the Associated Press, the BBC, ABC, NBC, maybe CBS, National Public Radio, News Corp. and the top U.K. dailies, said Ken Doctor, the newspaper veteran who's now an analyst at Outsell. "If a news-media organization sees itself as covering the wider world, sees it as its foundation, that in and of itself differentiates it from all the local media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- out there," he said. "If, in addition, it has substantial reporting and editing resources, then it can play. The tough part is the part we're in: Who wins the race to ubiquity and can make it pay off?"

NYT: If The Globe Were Sold, What Price? “The best guesstimate of the real price: a buck. The best of an announced price: between $50 and $100 million,” he wrote in an e-mail message. The devil will be in the details of the obligations that a buyer would assume, he said, adding that “a buck essentially represents a gentleman’s agreement: I take a liability, headache and a distraction off your hands.”
He said that the Times Company could hang on to some pension liabilities or other obligations in exchange for a higher purchase price, a number that would give the appearance that it was getting something for the more than $1 billion it paid 16 years ago. He added that no bank would be interested in financing a deal given how other deals have blown up, so “the owner’s own money is immediately at risk.”

BizTimes.com: Journal Sentinel faces daunting choices“There’s no strategy – this is panic. What we’re likely to see this year (around the country) and what we’ll see in Milwaukee too is (publishers asking) how much they need to cut back and how much they can do to still hold their place in the market. For publishers, it’s about ‘How do we stay alive and stay profitable until we can get to some sort of breathing period?’ (Economic) recovery will not bring back their old business, but it will give them some breathing room.”

AP: Threat to shut Boston Globe shows no paper is safThe threat to close the paper "sends a very clear message to all employees and unions of surviving newspapers — that this is not business as usual. This is uncharted territory....Newspapers all "have a sword over their heads," said Doctor. If the industry wants to survive, he said, "everyone has to give some blood."

March 2010

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March 27, 2006

10 More (Web-Oriented) Questions for Gary Pruitt

These additional questions for Mr. Pruitt, just in from a web-savvy colleague who prefers anonymity given the tossing and turning of the publishing world. They highlight the kind of smarts McClatchy will now be expected to bring to its web publishing efforts, given its rank as the #2 newspaper company. (It will still have that rank after selling off Knight Ridder's Dirty Dozen, with first bids due tomorrow.)

What questions would you add?

Did
you think twice before deciding to jettison the online audience (55% of
KRD’s total unique users and 36% of pageviews in Feb '06) the “dirty
dozen” papers would have generated for you?

What’s
your plan for winning more online ad dollars, when the vast majority of
those dollars seem to flow to online portals and aggregators with much
greater scale of audience?

Do
you have a plan for transitioning your company to an era when the bulk
of a news publisher’s revenue must be derived from online rather than
print media, or do you plan to be out of the industry before that
happens?

If
a recent college graduate asked you why they should pursue a career in
either A) journalism, or B) the business of newspaper publishing, what
would you tell them?

Jon Fine reports that according
to you, “The growth of craigslist and other almost wholly free
classified sites ‘does not mean that [newspapers’ classified] revenues
over time will shrink’”. Did you really say that, and if so, can you explain your thinking?

Do newspapers need to do a better job of reaching younger audiences? And if so, what’s your plan to achieve this?

If
you had to choose, today, between running a company focused exclusively
on news generation or one focused exclusively on classified ad revenue,
which would you choose, and why?

Do you believe that superior journalism is a direct driver of superior financial performance? If so, can you explain the link between the two?

Which blogs do you read on a regular basis? And which RSS feeds to you subscribe to?

In
economically stagnant markets, is the need for quality local journalism
greater than, or less than, the need for such journalism in rapidly
growing markets? And in either case: who should be responsible for providing that journalism?